Stage winner Tyler Hamilton: "I mean, this is incredible. A few days
ago I started getting extremely tired, and I felt like I was starting to pay for
all the suffering I'd done since the crash in Stage 1. Bjarne Riis gave the team
- we had a meeting last night, and he told the team to stay focused, there are
five stages left, to keep the morale high and keep fighting. The team did that
today. I'm very happy. I owe today, I dedicate this victory to my teammates
because at the beginning of the race, I was caught in the 2nd group, the peloton
split, and they dropped back five riders to help me catch back on. Without their
help, I wouldn't have won today."

On whether he had decided to attack before the stage: "It just
depended: if my legs felt good, I was going to try. It worked out perfectly
because I had a teammate up the road in the breakaway [Nicki Sørensen] and he
dropped back from the breakaway and helped me bridge up, and then he rode hard,
as hard as he could, until the last climb."